Inside Oracle's Middleware Community

Thursday Nov 06, 2014

With each Open World we continue to see incredible innovations carried out by our customers and partners. One theme that has gained a lot of traction this year is Internet of Things (IoT). Today we will take a closer look at a session that covered a live IoT story at one of our customers, co-presented with our customer, partner, and product teams. We will look at Oracle’s IoT platform and how Fusion Middleware bridges the gap between device data and enterprise applications.

IoT drives industrial innovations but also presents various challenges. For example, the lack of standardization and the lack of integration prohibit a lot of businesses from benefiting from this industrial trend. Oracle has a complete IoT platform that answers to those challenges in the following ways:

Let us take a closer look at our customer, Superior Industries, who presented in this Open World session. Superior implemented an automatic equipment tracking and JDE process automation solution with an Oracle Gold Partner, EmeraldCube Solutions. A Minnesota manufacturing company selling material-handling equipment, Superior Industries is a JDE customer that faced a particular problem: they had no automated way to track machine usage and maintenance. Their manual tracking using paper, vocal communication, and manual work orders produced a number of issues: lack of accuracy, consistency, reliability and scalability. Machines were often either over-maintained or under-maintained.

sample of a hand-written maintenance schedule that could easily get lost

To address these problems, Superior reached out to EmeraldCube, an Oracle partner who provides an IoT solution including sensor technology and a Java-embedded platform for JDE users. Their EmeraldSensor was used to track Superior’s equipment utilization and cycles via electric current monitoring; when machines need maintenance, the platform automatically creates work orders in JDE through the Assets & Maintenance module.

•Maintenance: Technicians only do preventive maintenance when needed thus recovering some lost opportunity costs

•Trends: Visibility into usage patterns and how they correlate with production. Allows plant managers to detect if machines are over/under utilized

The projected savings amount to over $80,000/year in labor costs alone, and over $100,000/year in maintenance costs.

The session concludes with a demo from Oracle’s Fusion Middleware product management team, showing a facility monitoring scenario that happens to closely resemble the use case from Superior. Equipment temperature data is monitored and analyzed by Java-embedded gateways, which perform first level of processing. Alerts are sent to the Fusion Middleware enterprise back end to go through a second level of event processing. Business processes are driven by these alerts. When a work order needs to be created, Fusion Middleware also performs that automatically through JDE EnterpriseOne’s asset management API. Meanwhile, user interactions are performed in an Oracle MAF application, where business rules on the gateway can also be updated. Because the gateway is smart, it can open up APIs and understand commands coming from outside. The demo flow can be explained in the following chart.

The demo architecture reviews an end-to-end view of how the different Oracle technologies work together to deliver the solution. We will release a viewlet of this demo very soon and you will find it on this blog.

This session proves that IoT is no longer a catchphrase. Oracle customers are already benefiting and innovating from this revolution, and Oracle has a complete IoT platform with best-in-class technology in every level, from Java-embedded devices and gateways to middleware and applications – engineered to work together.

Thursday Oct 04, 2012

Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle.

Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation

This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies:

How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata.

Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a "product" to a "product +" experience. There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices. Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences.

To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid. Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns. This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid.

Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels

Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use. This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands.

Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform.

Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account - like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012.

Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications

Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems.

Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons:

1. High performance
2. Ease of management

Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications

Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion.

Faster Processing of Big Data

Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata. This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone.

Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data.